Susan, I take your general question to be: should a law maker understand the law they are making? The answer seems obviously to be YES. But then those voting on the law should understand it too, and by extenion those that vote for those people - but this is never going to happen, law makers and citizens just cannot all be experts in law and each specific field - from technology, through economics and every other subject that laws are made about. The way the UK get's around this is by having the House of Lords - its tottaly un-democratic, and that's a wonderful thing for many resons. One being that one group of the members of the house tend to get there through merit. So the Lords does have experts in many fields that can help in the review and revision of new laws. But it's far from perfect, no political system is, we can only work to have the lest imperfect one. I'm not sure how an 'pure' sysem of democracy or specfically the US system (as it presently stands) can get around this. So to you, do you understand evey piece of legislation that ever law maker that you ever voted for said that they were for or against?